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Saturday, 26 May 2012

Press Here, Hervé Tullet

I absolutely fell in love with this book this week when my 4 year-old's best friend lent it to us to have a look at as a possible birthday present for another friend. We read it straight away, and both my boys were enthralled, as was Eva, the book's owner, who'd heard it a thousand times before. Originally written in French (we've borrowed it in Catalan) it works perfectly well in English, and I'm sure in any language you'd care to translate it into. It's really really simple, a brilliant idea that looks lovely on the page and is great fun to read. Especially with an enthusiastic, expectant tone of voice for the instructions, and one of excited surprise for the results.

Instructions??? Results??? What happens when you press here? Have a look:

Then we have three! Then we have to rub one of the dots... And it turns red! Wow! How did we DO that? We rub another... And it turns blue! Magic! Then they multiply... Shake the book... and:

Tip the book to the right, and...

Woah! And so on and so forth, until they start to grow and grow and grow and hardly fit on the page. What happens now?

My boys have great fun getting into this interactive book, rubbing, tapping, shaking, even blowing the coloured dots around the page, in and out of the dark and more. I'm wondering how long the binding will last under all this vigorous enthusiasm, and I'm thinking that we'd better give it back to Eva and get our own copy, just in case...

I didn't know this artist's work before coming across Press Here, but I'll definitely be checking out some of his other titles, all of them designed for adults and children to play with, interact with, and enjoy the images on the page. He has also made some colouring and scribble books that look good fun and seem to invite more creativity than your standard books of this type.

I've got a new nephew arriving at the end of this month, and I think that his big brother will definitely be getting a Hervé Tullet book to celebrate the occasion. Any excuse will do!